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Thomson Reuters classifies 93 journals in the linguistics category in its Journal Citation Reports – Social Sciences for 2009. The table above lists the top 20 publications ranked by their five-year impact, which is defined as the total number of citations in 2009 made to papers published in the journals in 2004-08, divided by the number of citable items (research articles and reviews) from 2004 to 2008.

This measure is different from the more traditional impact factor, which is defined as total citations in Year 3 to papers in a journal in Years 1 and 2, divided by the number of citable items in Years 1 and 2. The five–year impact factor measures average influence over a longer period than the traditional impact factor, and is particularly useful in examining journal influence for those fields in the sciences and social sciences that require a relatively longer period of time to elapse before they typically achieve their peak level of citations post-publication.

The number of citable items recorded from each journal in 2009 is provided to give the reader some idea about the size and reach of the journals in question. The number of total citations in 2009 represents citations recorded that year to papers in the journal of any year to illustrate the publications’ contemporary gross influence.

Of course, as the results indicate, those journals with a long history and ones that have published larger numbers of papers have more opportunity to receive citations than those with shorter histories and smaller output.

The problem with this ranking of Linguistics journals is that it does not reflect prominence and influence within the field of Linguistics; it vastly exaggerates the role of journals that are familiar to non-linguists (mainly psychologists but also computer scientists and language teachers.) As a result, journals in psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and Applied linguistics are over-rated and journals in descriptive and theoretical linguistics are under-rated.